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1. This great utterance fell from the lips of a man who had newly seen God, and caught thereby an original conception of His redemptive work for the world through captive and desolate Israel. No one can miss the meaning of this joyous outburst. It is an evangel. Sursum corda, he cries. Do not give way to repining though you are lonely and heartsore as a childless woman. Say not "my tent is destroyed and all my tent-pins are plucked up: my children are gone away and there is none to spread out my tent any more, or to set up my tent-curtains" (Jeremiah 10:20). Get up and make your tent-.pins strong: lengthen your cords and fasten your plugs. Be not content with a little space. Roominess and magnificence befit your prospects. Your expulsion will be your expansion, your desolation your increase, your captivity your exaltation. The area covered by your race shall be larger than of yore. The prophet could speak that word of hope and endeavour because he had received his new vision of God. Insight was the warrant for utterance. He knew the meaning of the Exile through his purer conception of the character and purposes of Jehovah. He saw the supreme and universal sovereignty of God; the universal brotherhood of man; the essential spirituality of the Hebrew religion, that it could and would exist without a temple and without a priest, without an altar and without a land, without anything save the soul and God; that it was to cease to be a local religion and become universal, and instead of remaining a national luxury would become an aggressive missionary and world-caving agency. He looked along the highways of the future, and saw the approach of the delivering God, and cried, "Behold your God! Man has a fatal and pathetic facility both for losing himself and his best treasures. Apostolic Christianity went everywhere preaching the Word. It was essentially aggressive. It placed itself by the side of the ancient religions of Greece and Rome, always absorbent of their good, but finally replacing them by its richer ideas and stronger spiritual impulses. The fires of the Christ-given passion to save all men burnt on, although alas l with diminishing intensity, for more than two centuries. The Reformation itself had little or no missionary passion, and the desponding leader said, with unfathomable sadness — a fore-gleam of the agony and pity that stirred the Churches at a later date: "Asia and Africa have no Gospel; another hundred years and all will be over. God's Word will disappear for want of any to preach it. Surely not, O prophet of God! The Word of the Lord endureth for ever. When the night is darkest, then up leap the stars. The living God is always at work. An astronomer gazed so long on the sun that he could see nothing else. The image was burned into him. For years before May 81, 1792, the vision of God as the God of Missions had arrested, held, moulded, and swayed the soul of Carey. Isaiah repeats Micah, Luther repeats the psalmist, Carey repeats the prophet, and so the Word of the Lord has flee course and is multiplied.

2. It is a revealing fact that, though Carey gained his messagefrom the words of prophecy, he expressed it in the simple and characteristic language of the closing years of the eighteenth century — the century of the expansion of England and of the great evangelical revival. "Expect great things," said he that he that he voiced the thought of his generation; expect them from God" — in that he expressed the knowledge and insight of men taught by the Spirit.

3. George Sand reminds us: "It is the heart that governs the world; it is feeling that performs the real miracles of history." Carey's persistent determination that the Church should evangelize the world was fed by what Vinet calls "the passion for souls." His perception of evil was acute. His sense of sin strong. His reliance on Christ unhesitatingly entire. He scarcely seems to have had a thought apart from Christ and His salvation. And yet at the root of all, and over all, and through all was a self-consuming love of men, of all men, and of "heathen" men most of all; and therefore forgetting himself this one thing he did, he founded modern missions by the gift of himself, out and out, in serving and suffering so that he might save men. Ah! it is here we fail. "We do not love men for their own sake or for God's sake. We need to change our style; it is cramped and fettered.

(J. Clifford, D. D.)

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KJV: Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes;

WEB: "Enlarge the place of your tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of your habitations; don't spare: lengthen your cords, and strengthen your stakes.